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teeks99 writes "The latest version of Ubuntu — 10.10, called Maverick Meerkat — has been released. This release contains new improvements, like an update to the Ubuntu One online service (with music streaming), Shotwell instead of F-Spot, the new Unity interface (for netbooks), and an upgrade to just about every piece of existing software. The announcement e-mail has more details."

Has anyone given it a good testing? I've noticed a horrible trend that Canonical tends to rush their releases these days, especially today. Trying to hit the 10/10/10 deadline makes me wonder what they've left broken to meet their target date.

If you use a second keyboard layout and switching, don't upgrade, this still isn't fixed and it's hell, at random points in time it starts rapidly changing the layout, leading to weird results in what you type.

Also there are two problems with the NVidia driver - one is that the text is horribly slow with the included driver, you need to install the beta from the site, and the other is that the nouveau driver fucks up the card and makes it impossible to use the card, so I had to revert to an older kernel. There's a bug for this too somewhere, can't remember the ID.

After a previous kernel update once caused a kernel panic whenever I switched between wireless connections (e.g. activating hibernate at the office and reactivating the notebook back home) I'm kinda wary of these things.

The upgrade was *flawless*. I've done enough bad Ubuntu upgrades that I find this remarkable, and very cheering. Ubuntu upgrades are notoriously terrible - particularly compared to how well Debian does - and I'm glad they appear to be paying more attention now.

Using it has been just fine and absolutely smooth. I'm using standard 10.10, not the netbook version - there's no reason not to IMO.

Two thumbs up! Four stars! Upgrade, er, tomorrow, when the servers aren't melting!

I upgraded to the beta and I had to babysit the upgrade over about four days as they boned the package archive. LOADS of missing dependencies that caused the install to want to remove big pieces of my system, which it would probably have done with -y. You got very lucky, because my upgrades were painful. They did finally work though, and I am free of conflicts and unresolved deps... Now I'm just dealing with the bugs they introduced in this revision, like GDM not properly handling multiple monitors, or my one-of-the-most-common-models Cambridge bluetooth dongle no longer working. Well, bootsplash did vanish, and I never noticed.

It would also be nice if on fresh installs to flash media Ubuntu would automatically disable readahead. Readahead from a flash device accomplishes very little and doing it from a SLOW flash device will increase your boot time significantly, as the machine NEEDS to have something to do while it is reading from the storage device. Right now it seems like Ubuntu has nothing to improve but eye candy, and so they are doing this and don't care if they break anything in the process.

The best part was converting from x86 to x86_64... I forget where I did that, though. Pretty recently. The same install has been on various disks and filesystem types, and on probably six or seven different computers as defined by motherboard. That it works at all is amazing. I chalk that up more to Debian, Linux itself, and grub than anything else, but obviously Ubuntu has not managed to completely destroy all that is good about Debian and since I run it so much I obviously see value in it. I'm just pissed because right now I'm being boned again by a change they made. The last one was broken Linksys WUSB11... Linux is also the only real solution for a lot of machines designed for Vista, which is a real thing.

I've installed it on my Acer Aspire One netbook and for the most part it has been good. The new Unity interface has some severe performance problems in my experience though. Also, Unity doesn't currently let you do much in the way of customising it via GUI tools. Adding a custom launcher [ubuntuforums.org], for example, is quite long winded.

It seems so far to be pretty good. It feels like a slight evolution of 10.04 rather than the huge leap 10.04 was from 9.10. There isn't a huge amount different, but that might explain why it seems much more stable than 9.10 and 10.04 were when they were initially released.

Oh my ; the article that you link shows that the most popular Linux distro... has more negative articles online about it than the others. Who'da thunk?

If it showed that the ratio of positive articles to negative articles was different, that might be something, even if that might just reflect the relatively inexperienced user base of Ubuntu (because it's more popular, it's going to cover more of the bell curve of expertise). But it doesn't even try.

It does compare it to Windows. Surprisingly, negative Windows articles are more popular than negative Ubuntu articles. Way to go with that insight.

If he thoroughly verified that the software works for him and his users, then what's your point? Does additional testing and "yes, it's ready" sentence from Canonical, make any difference? It makes sense to wait for the release version if you don't have resources to do the testing. OTOH having tests concluded by Canonical does not mean, that you don't have to do any testing yourself.

"Pre-release" means anything and everything can change/break with the next update. Which is why no-one who knows WTF they're doing will install pre-release software on a *production* machine. In fact, any admin who installs software on production machines which has not seen at least 90 days of *post-release* testing is an idiot and should be fired. You only install properly vetted software and updates -- that's rule number one!!!

Naw, he treats it like a fighting game, first starting off with the low level NPC, the managers. When he succeeds there, he moves on to go mano-a-mano with accountants. Finally after emerging victorious, he gets to the final level -- developers! At around that point the release is ready for rollout...

Let me get this straight - you're running pre-release Ubuntu on 60 production machines? Where's your boss, I think he needs to have a talk with you (and show you the door). No IT professional would be caught dead doing that. Besides, let's be honest here - most accountants and managers "require" MS Office (or some other Windows-only software), and wouldn't use Ubuntu.

And what the hell are you saying about being built on Debian, which leads to professional and real-world experience, whereas Fedora doesn't have that? Have you ever heard of RHEL?

I use RHEL5 at work. I hate it with the fiery passion of a million supernovas. It doesn't help that rhel5 is like six years old, and 5.4 isn't much better. Who else likes using a version of gedit so old it doesn't even have syntax highlighting? My hobbyist Linux development environment at home should not far outshine my professional Linux development environment at work.

While I agree that your parent probably shouldn't be installing pre-release OSes on production machines, I have to admit that given the choice between pre-release Ubuntu and RHEL5, I'd choose pre-release Ubuntu in a heartbeat.

I was running it on a few. It's a good way to discover if anything that I rely on needs fixing before the real release - bugs are more likely to get worked on when they are reported asap after being introduced. Plus the software itself isn't really pre-release; the actual software versions of core packages are usually considered stable upstream. If you are capable of handling problems yourself, and can accept small amounts of downtime (i.e. non-critical services), then it makes sense to run the development release of your distribution of choice on a few systems.

When MS Office 2007 came out everybody started receiving xlsx and docx files and the old versions of MS Office most folks had installed couldn't open them. For the die hards (there were a few) I installed the compatibility pack (buried in the bowels of Microsoft's site since I guess they figure most places are willing to just throw money out the Windows(tm) and will buy a new version but I see no reason to re-buy something as trivial as a word processing program which works perfectly well already), but lots of folks got Oo instead. I even changed the icons for some of them to "ease the transition" and to tell you the truth, a lot of them didn't notice the difference. Some that did liked the presentation program better than Powerpoint and swung the whole sales staff over just on that reason. When users ran into something that worked differently (like how to edit headers/footers or tracking changes) they just chalked it up to the "new version". Since we already use Firefox and Thunderbird some folks have migrated over to Ubuntu from Windows (I always used a LTS version but then found they had decided to upgrade to the bleeding edge on their own later and seemed to have no issues most of the time so I let them play). We're not a big company (maybe 100 PCs), and we do engineering and development work so most people are pretty tech savvy, but of course the big issue was our ERP system which is designed for Windows, but its turned out easier to maintain that through terminal services anyway.

Personally I love Kubuntu, and so if the other KDE distros are better then great. Heard good things about OpenSuse. However, I know I can get pretty much any software in existence packaged in a.deb these days, so I've no real desire to switch.

As I use neither Unity nor Ubuntu One, I'm going to be sticking with 10.04, which is the latest long term support version. In fact, I think I'll even install 10.04 instead of 10.10 when I buy a new computer later this year.

I seem to recall previous, preliminary announcements claiming that there would be more items upgraded in 10.10. I wonder if I was imagining that, or if Canonical decide some of the other upgrades were not worth the effort? (Or maybe I was thinking of Xubuntu.)

But, the kernel is worth the upgrade - along with some other userspace requirements that go hand-in-hand with the kernel.For example, the (newer?) Xorg for using newer features from the graphics/drm drivers etc.

The newer kernel gives you:o. more h/w support (drivers moved from staging into mainline)o. newer filesystems (ceph anyone?)o. newer archs (tile is now included in mainline)
- just to name a few reasons.

Granted I haven't checked what all is actually bundled, but if you can live with manually updating the kernel and the bits that go along with it, you can definitely stick with 10.04LTS provided you're not on paid support from Canonical which might get voided if you change the kernel.

As time passes by, the distro is bound to get into equilibrium - at which point, we can't expect major changes.

But, the kernel is worth the upgrade - along with some other userspace requirements that go hand-in-hand with the kernel.
For example, the (newer?) Xorg for using newer features from the graphics/drm drivers etc.

If you're running 10.04, none of your applications will know how to use any of these new Xorg features. They won't know they exist

The newer kernel gives you:
o. more h/w support (drivers moved from staging into mainline)

My hardware already works if I'm already running 10.04. Why would I need more hardware support?

o. newer filesystems (ceph anyone?)

Why does my desktop need ceph? Ext4 is plenty good for a desktop. If I'm running a server, why would I be changing the configuration of a production machine? Am I really going to be upgrading everything to ceph?

o. newer archs (tile is now included in mainline)

Whoo, now I can upgrade my x86-64 to a tile processor! This is the feature I needed!

- just to name a few reasons.

Granted I haven't checked what all is actually bundled, but if you can live with manually updating the kernel and the bits that go along with it, you can definitely stick with 10.04LTS provided you're not on paid support from Canonical which might get voided if you change the kernel.

As time passes by, the distro is bound to get into equilibrium - at which point, we can't expect major changes.

NONE of these reasons compel me to upgrade 10.04 a 10.10 on an already working, functional system. The only good reason would be if your hardware wasn't supported in the older kernel, but I'm assuming you wouldn't be using Ubuntu if your hardware wasn't supported.

The only thing left to care about is userspace changes, but it sounds like the userspace changes are minor.

Consider a filesystem. It consists of a series of descriptive headers, and associated file data (inode, data and directory information if we stay within a posix compliant definition).

"fscking" or checking a filesystem that is in an "unknown" state (basically, doing a forensic analysis) means that we will need to look at the blocks comprising the file system, identifying the descriptive headers and associated file data, dealing with potential overlaps, and extracting the data.

Of course, this requires at least one pass over all data on the disk, and (given the current state of hard disk i/o) this operation will take days on a 5TB disk.

How is this sped up? One answer is to only allow inodes to reside on certain (pre-determined) disk locations. This strategy reduces the time to scan for files to just examining the potential inodes. Also, as long as there is no overlap, data does not need to be copies. The can dramatically reduce the time needed.

We can also use a journal; if the inodes are presumed correct, and all inode updates go through the journal, everything can be brought to "correctness" in the time needed to scan the journal. But, we are PRESUMING the inode correctness -- an errant filesystem driver or firmware may have "scribbled" somewhere it shouldn't have.

A log based filesystem can provide for "fast" checking -- but, again, we are presuming correctness of the already written data.

Something like ZFS can provide for a solution -- given sufficient memory. But, to ensure data integrity, each piece of written data must be redundantly written. And, the data must be scrubbed at a sufficient interval.

Log-based systems are not yet in common use; ZFS is solaris or bsd only, with production systems using solaris. btrfs is not yet ready for production use (and isn't even comparable to ZFS yet).

The only practical (current) production answer in the Linux space is journaling, with underlying RAID.

Of course, it's your data, and if you are comfortable using and testing btrfs, go for it.

The main reason why I try to use the latest version of Ubuntu is mainly due to having the latest kernel and packages. The latest kernel is obvious - bug fixes in things like filesystems, drivers and other lower-level components are rather important. Regarding packages, it's an unfortunate fact that despite PPAs, it's still a bitch to keep up to date with the latest versions of most software. Ubuntu generally only packages security and minor version updates for things, and that's generally not enough for a desktop Linux distro where a lot of applications are undergoing fast-paced development, with major changes between versions.

That and the fact, from my experience at least, Canonical has a habit of leaving anything that's critically broken in an older version of Ubuntu and instead focusing on the latest distro. LTS versions are useless if all they're getting are security updates but half-implemented functionality is only being finished in later releases.

As a photographer, I like Shotwell. As a programmer, I like it a little more than the mono updates that come along with f-spot (and I don't like Miguel).

But here's what's kept me from abandoning gthumb2 for shotwell. Shotwell keeps pictures in ~/Pictures by default. There is no way for it to randomly pick up a directory and operate on it. I've often thought about hacking that up, but for Vala & the associated learning curve I've been too lazy to tackle.

Oh, and before someone rabbles "ITS THE COMMAND LINE THIS IS WHY LINUX IS NOT READY FOR THE DESKTOP RAGAGEDHDHA" there's a GUI way to do it: Right click the folder in nautilus and click Make Link, you'll get a shortcut. Delete the Pictures folder, cut and paste that link file that was made and rename it to Pictures.

The command line ones. They often can be copy-pasted, and are much more language neutral (though not so much in this particular case)

Language is a pretty big barrier for giving GUI explanations. For instance, I don't have my GUI in English, so if I were to try to explain this to somebody here, I'd have the problem of not knowing the exact name of the "Make Link" option. It could be "Make Symlink" or "Create Link" for all I know. But in the commandline, "ln" is always "ln", and the name of the Pictures folder is one of the very few deviations from that.

But which one is easier to remember? The graphical ones. If I want to follow this procedure again in a year, what are the chances I'm going to remember those two lines exactly? Even a single character off could have bad results, ore more likely not work at all. Sure, most of us on/. have memorized simple commands like rm, ln, and their common parameters, but the average user is NOT going to memorize that, nor should they have to. The graphical procedure is visual and self-correcting. You need to make a link, so even if you don't remember exactly what kind of link, or how to do it, you see a simple "make link" option when you right-click on a folder.

If I have to look up the command line syntax every time I want to make a link, it's a lot slower than just using the GUI method. I have to figure out what to type in the search engine, and sort through for something that tells me how to do exactly what I want to do.

Another problem is long paths to directories. Sure, typing ~/Pictures is easy enough, but what if it's ~/Desktop/android-sdk-mac_86/tools (random example), or something worse. It is hard to accurately remember and type long paths in the command line, but with the GUI there is no chance for mistakes assuming you don't have multiple files with very similar names.

Of course it's great that the CLI is there, but usability is a lot better if a GUI option is available too.

But which one is easier to remember? The graphical ones. If I want to follow this procedure again in a year, what are the chances I'm going to remember those two lines exactly? Even a single character off could have bad results, ore more likely not work at all. Sure, most of us on/. have memorized simple commands like rm, ln, and their common parameters, but the average user is NOT going to memorize that, nor should they have to.

That's why you make a script. Or copy/paste again from the original source, which could be a website or an email.

The graphical procedure is visual and self-correcting. You need to make a link, so even if you don't remember exactly what kind of link, or how to do it, you see a simple "make link" option when you right-click on a folder.

That's because you already understand what you want to do, and know perhaps 90% of what's required and are only missing minor details like what you mentioned.

However that fails horribly the second something unexpected happens. For instance, "Start" is not called "Start" because they're using a french OS, the taskbar has been accidentally moved to the top or a side of the screen, or they moved from XP to Vista, or the menu has "helpfully" hidden the infrequently used items, and Word doesn't appear at first sight in it anymore.

It's really hard to give instructions that account for all the possible trivial but confusing variations in a GUI. It's maddening over the phone because you have to describe something without being able to show it, and only slightly less so online.

Command lines have much less variability to them. "ls" is still "ls", and "cp" is still "cp", and so are many other things. So quite a few scripts from 10 years ago will work perfectly fine. GUI instructions need to be constantly updated to keep up with different languages, and minor OS revisions, and are much more time consuming to test to make sure they still apply.

If I have to look up the command line syntax every time I want to make a link, it's a lot slower than just using the GUI method. I have to figure out what to type in the search engine, and sort through for something that tells me how to do exactly what I want to do.

Where do you get the knowledge where to click in a GUI? You always have that problem

Another problem is long paths to directories. Sure, typing ~/Pictures is easy enough, but what if it's ~/Desktop/android-sdk-mac_86/tools (random example), or something worse. It is hard to accurately remember and type long paths in the command line, but with the GUI there is no chance for mistakes assuming you don't have multiple files with very similar names.

Then you use tab completion, or simply take advantage of that somebody already figured the path out for you, and copy/paste it from a forum. If you need to do it multiple times, bookmark or make a script.

Of course it's great that the CLI is there, but usability is a lot better if a GUI option is available too.

Usability is best with neither, really.

The best usability belongs to the TUI: The single tasked full screen (normally text) application. A good one has a very linear workflow, lacks hot keys that cause unexpected results, and can very reliably used by the "follow a list" method because everything is always done the same way, is in the same place, is done in the same order and looks the same as yesterday, and there's no way for the user to change that.

Really? Using a GUI is a lot like going to the toolbox and grabbing a tool. Sometimes a tool gets misplaced and you're going to have to hunt for it. Words (like CLI commands) are always right there.

Sure, we've all had the experience where a word is right on the tip of our tongue and we can't think of it. But it's an uncommon experience, which is why it's remarkable. We all have enormous English vocabularies that we can call up instantly. On the other hand, most of us lose something every day. I've learned to keep the important things (keys) at hand, but I couldn't tell you where the swiss army knife I was just using is.

GUIs are the same way. When I use a GUI, I am constantly asking myself "ok, which menu was that command in?". With a CLI you never have to know where your commands are. Just speak the words and it is done. It's like a fucking magical incantation. That is what I call easy.

If I have to look up the command line syntax every time I want to make a link, it's a lot slower than just using the GUI method. I have to figure out what to type in the search engine

Search.. engine..? If you invoke 'ln' with no arguments, it tells you to use --help for more information. When you do that you get a nice list of options. It's all right there at your fingertips.

Another problem is long paths to directories. Sure, typing ~/Pictures is easy enough, but what if it's ~/Desktop/android-sdk-mac_86/tools (random example), or something worse.

That's what tab completion is for. This explains why you think the CLI is harder than the GUI. You're doing it wrong. The CLI has been around for long enough that it has tools to get around all these problem cases. The GUI is getting there. Features like desktop search are helping to solve the "where is it?" problem I described above. But, surprise, surprise, they do it by becoming more like the CLI.

Do you see the irony in your comment? You've tried to negate the predictable complaints about having to use the command line to fix something - by providing instructions on how to workaround a bug (it's a bug as far as I'm concerned) with a program that comes standard with Ubuntu now.

In other words, you haven't nullified the argument that Linux isn't ready for the desktop at all, because the workaround provided shouldn't even be necessary IN THE FIRST PLACE. No wonder people get tired of this shit. At least we have the choice to use another app I suppose

First, it's not a bug. It's a feature that doesn't exist that he would like to exist. There is a difference between a bug and a feature request.

Next, the reason use CLI stuff to explain something is because it's faster. The post describing how to do it via CLI was two lines long. The post explaining how to do it in the GUI was much more than that.

...because the workaround provided shouldn't even be necessary IN THE FIRST PLACE...

So every piece of software should do everything that everyone might want it to do?

This workaround offers a feature enhancement, not a bug fix, as I've said before. Can you explain how to get any number of windows, import photo applications to import to different folder? Is it even possible? Well, when you are done with your instructions, go ahead and answer the "because the workaround provided shouldn't even be necessary IN THE FIRST PLACE" you brought up because it didn't know where I wanted the images copied before I told it.

Say all paths used by an application are stored in the application's configuration file. Where would the path to this configuration file be stored, other than hardcoding something like ~/.$appname/preferences.ini?

It's very simple for one person who knows how to do something using a command line to communicate that to someone else

It's also very simple for one person to communicate instructions that are the equivalent of sudo rm -rf/. For this reason, some users feel afraid to touch a Terminal for fear that they "might screw something up". A fear of typing commands appears to be common among people who only occasionally interact with PCs. I deal with an older relative who routinely asks me to remind her whether she has to use the space bar and capital letters in a Google search, rather than just trying it herself, out of fear that she "might screw something up" even within a web browser.

That's a cool (and obvious) workaround, but it doesn't solve the basic deficiency of a tool that has to be used in a specific way which conflicts with many people's workflow. Ubuntu is on the "two steps back" model.

WTH?? Why are you avoiding mechanism which is in place for those things, namely XDG user dirs? Shotwell, as every good behaving application, uses directory which user defined for storing pictures. This define can be changed with command

Over the past year or so it has become clear that even on heavy open source/Linux focused sites like Slashdot that the fanatical enthusiasm for desktop Linux that existed throughout the 2000s has mostly dissipated into a resignation that the dream is dead. OS X continues to leave Linux far, far behind in marketshare in the consumer space. And Windows 7 has squashed the now unrealistic dreams from the Vista days that consumers would abandon Microsoft for Linux.

One just has to look at how Google took the Linux core and created a single stable set of APIs and development tools and have come to dominate the cellphone market in sales in just a couple of years and wonder what could have been with desktop Linux if it hadn't been for the juvenile license wars, API and desktop manager wars, and spinning cubes instead of real world usability that sums up most of the past decade of Linux development.

Windows 7 really has sucked the enthusiasm out of the push to get people to migrate to Linux. The huge amount of progress Microsoft has made with security and stability have left very little reason for the average home computer user to make a change.

My experience is that the same is now true for Linux. Running modern distros on older hardware requires using esoteric window managers and special settings, or else you have to deal with the same sluggishness and hard-drive grinding that you have to deal with on Windows. Also, the GUI is generally much less responsive than on Windows, making it feel even slower. Again, you can tweak and tweak and tweak until it is more acceptable, but will the average user do this?

Both Apple and Linux. Microsoft has serious competition of OS X in the desktop space, and from Linux in the server space. The Microsoft server offerings got orders of magnitude better when Linux starting taking off.

"In January 2001, Microsoft CEO Bill Gates explained the attraction of adopting Linux in an internal memo that was released in the Comes vs Microsoft case. He said:&ldquo; Our most potent Operating System competitor is Linux and the phenomena around Open Source and free software. The same phenomena fuels competitors to all of our products. The ease of picking up Linux to learn it or to modify some piece of it is very attractive. The academic community, start up companies, foreign governments and many other constituencies are putting their best work into Linux.[122]"

Every time I ride the bus, I am struck by how many people are using iPhones -- particularly the poor people. It's counter-intuitive, until you realize that if you can only afford one Internet-capable device, instead of several, you're going to choose the one that does the most, which is most likely an iPhone.

I think a more accurate picture is that Microsoft is challenged on the enterprise end by Linux, on the consumer end by Apple, and in the Internet by Google. Microsoft is powerful, but boxed in. I think there are signs that Microsoft is exploring alliances with the open source community in order to break out of that box.

No, Apple has its niche of high-end computers and will not give it up. From that position it does not threaten Microsoft - Apple does not have a single laptop under $1k, so they have not made any netbooks, meaning that Microsoft continues to dominate the cheap market. Also, Apple has been generally ignoring much of the business scene. Apple does have iPhones and iPads, but those are not markets that desktop Windows could get into. This is why Linux is so dangerous - it attacks Windows in both business and on the average person's desktop. Windows and Linux simply cannot coexist, and Microsoft knows that.

Other might not necessarily be desktop operating systems. Infact, I have a feeling it's various smartphone devices, consoles, etc. Infact I'm curious how large part of other is Android, which is based on the Linux kernel (but is unlike any other Linux distro, and did fork the kernel...).

Considering the amount of computers around, I actually find 0.77% impressive since by those stats Mac is only "seven" times bigger than Linux. And Macintosh is widely advertised and have the whole brand thing, while there isn't much the case for Linux.

One just has to look at how Google took the Linux core and created a single stable set of APIs and development tools and have come to dominate the cellphone market in sales in just a couple of years and wonder what could have been with desktop Linux if it hadn't been for the juvenile license wars, API and desktop manager wars, and spinning cubes instead of real world usability that sums up most of the past decade of Linux development.

No, the problem is in the techie delusion that something which is ONLY a core (Linux) can somehow be used to define & identify a complete, consumer-oriented desktop platform. There is no SDK for "Linux", hence it is hostile to application developers. There are no reference hardware implementations for the desktop. There is no official IDE that app devs can use to establish their footing on the platform. There is no corporate sponsor which takes responsibility for the delivered OS soup-to-nuts.

Android addresses these underlying issues. And note that ANDROID != LINUX. It is not "Android Linux" and its not marketed that way. People off the street do not ask for a "Linux phone" after they've seen a nice Android unit by ad or acquaintance, which I think you'll agree would be meaningless. ANDROID is the identity of the platform, and techies know that Linux is "somewhere inside"; there is no suggestion of equivalent or interchangeable identity there.

Here's the thing: Its just as meaningless to refer to "Linux" desktops for consumers. But even if the techies start to focus on Ubuntu or somesuch, not only is the identity still "Ubuntu Linux" but Ubuntu is still missing much of what makes Android appealing to consumers and app developers (see above). Shuttleworth thinks he's read the book on platform creation when he really only has a clue (and yes, I could expand on that subtopic).

When consumers are sucked into the "desktop Linux" arena, they find themselves having to learn about different GUIs/desktops, different distros, different package managers and formats, numerous FOSS standards that define internal behavior like filesystems, and industry standards they never had to think about before. Often painfully, they learn that Nvidia is the only well-supported gfx card, the OS will screw them over upper/lowercase differences, they must learn the shell to fix stupid system defaults, and they must pass-on helpful info in CLI form or else other "Linux" users (often people just using a different release of the same distro) will be lost. People who are more technically inclined eventually learn that X11 and audio are designed with the wrong assumptions, and even well-written CLI scripts will break every six months if they have anything to do with managing system features.

Well, Ubuntu, like it or not, is the most popular linux distribution (that, or its users just have very loud mouths). I honestly don't see what the big deal about Ubuntu is anymore. Linux Mint does a much better job at being easy-to-use right out of the box (and doesn't make stupid design decisions involving window buttons... cough cough). For the more geek-inclined, Fedora is a very un-assuming distribution and makes for a much less awkward first experience compared to Ubuntu. And for the extremely geek-inclined, Arch Linux and just plain-ol-Debian are awesomeness. I'm using Arch right now, and if you can get it set up right the first time (thanks to their awesome documentation), you get a rolling release system with constant updates and a gigantic user repository of packages (I even maintain some packages for them, and it is to stupidly easy to make a pacman package that I'm never going back to deb/rpm)!

Thankfully, it's incredibly easy to distro-hop if you don't like the current distribution you're using enough;)

Although I would tend to agree with you, I use KUbuntu 10.04 today on my laptop and my MythTV box at home. Simply put, they're well put together, well supported and don't suffer from some of the strange GUI ideas that Canonical put in the regular Ubuntu (which shooed me away from it for a LONG time I might add).

I have used Macs for years, and still have my Macbook Pro for a few applications I just can't get under Linux (for example my own business is mostly managed using iRatchet, and I still haven't got a good way to get music and podcasts to my iPhone from Linux) but it took playing with KUbuntu on my laptop to convince me that Linux was ready for me to return. I used to run all kinds of distros... I have run Fedora numerous times, Gentoo, Redhat... you name it. I like the fact that for the most part Kubuntu gets out of my way and lets me get my work done the same way OSX does. I've had a couple of issues with wireless network not working after updates, but I find a second reboot usually clears that up. Other than that, it's rock solid stable, gets me better battery life than Windows 7 on the same hardware and generally just works like an operating system should.

Of course, freedom of choice is what Linux is all about anyway... and yes Mint is a great distro as well. However, I found that if I have a problem with Kubuntu it's usually much easier to find answers than it is for Mint simply because of the larger community of users.

Linux Mint does a much better job at being easy-to-use right out of the box (and doesn't make stupid design decisions involving window buttons... cough cough).

How? All I can see is it is a reskinned Ubuntu with "restricted extras" and medibuntu installed. I tried it on my HTPC/Nettop and it was about as easy to use as Ubuntu, except with a dog-ugly and inefficient Windows XP menu. It did not live up to the hype. Yes, it was prettier, and yes it maintained Windows-style buttons, but this doesn't really matter since I still had to put in 30 minutes to make it custom.

The same thing I do with every other Linux install, no matter the distro.

I don't get the button debate thing. It takes all of a minute to change them around. Most people don't use the stock desktop/look, so how hard it is it to change your buttons at the same time your changing your themes/fonts/icons? Hell, I always set them to the left anyways, so it saved me work.

Compiz and Flash and the NVIDIA ION still didn't play nice, and it still doesn't do HDMI audio. (does anyone have an ION box that manages HDMI sound and fullscreen flash from Firefox/Chromium and the Hulu app? What distro are you using? Did it require huge amounts of tweaking?). Meaning it still made me wish my MacMini had actual graphics and not some strange Intel chip.

I keep meaning to give Fedora or OpenSuse a spin. But haven't had the time to dig around. Ubuntu has been annoying me of late. I feel like its yelling at me to "web2.0 moar!", with all its silly social networking features that are a slight pain to remove. Perhaps I don't want to use my computer for updating Twitter and Facebook, or chatting, or... making faux friends. Perhaps the two computers I have running Ubuntu are for tasks? When I think of mock social people, the first people I think of aren't Linux nerds. I also keep tossing around trying a newer version of KDE (I haven't used it since it stopped being a Win95 clone), just to see if Amarok is indeed good (better than its Gnome brotheren).

It seems that at least from my location in Northern Europe the ISOs are not downloadable due to the server having been already Slashdotted. But luckily the files are also avaialble as official.Torrents [ubuntu.com]. Download speed currently 3MB/s, or the absolute maximum my DSL can handle.

I started when it went beta and every night since I finally got my upgrade ironed out (it took days before they got the package database in order such that you could actually complete an upgrade and not have packages trying to remove themselves) I've been doing

sudo at midnightaptitude update && aptitude -y dist-upgrade^D

Trying to upgrade today resulted in no updates, so I must be running final.

Let's see if they fixed the bluetooth driver they broke... nope. Failed to set bluetooth power. The error reported is: Connection timed out. Thanks for breaking the world's most common bluetooth dongle, dumbshits. I see testing is alive and well at Ubuntu... wait, no it isn't. And this bug was reported multiple times, including by me, before the release, but apparently replacing the working image manipulation software with one that uses a hardcoded directory for your library was more important than fixing bugs that they created since Lucid.

The market is ready for a Debian derivative that cares about stability and bugfixes. Ubuntu is like Wine, they break something every time they add new functionality and you can't trust that anything will continue to work through an upgrade.

I wanted to try debian but it's simply not as accessible as Ubuntu is.

When you go to Ubuntu.com you click the "Download Ubuntu" button and then hit "start download". Done and easy.

When you go to debian.org you're greeted with information overload. Lots of completely useless information and I had to figure out that you need to go to "getting debian" link in the menu. After you're there I'm still mystified as to what I'm suppose to download. Testing? Release? No recommendation as to what to use.

You click on the stable release and i386 and it shows you a list of 31 CDs.. lol wut? I'm suppose to download them all or what?

Of course if you lack the patience, attention span, or ability to read not more than two paragraphs of only mildly-technical, perhaps you shouldn't be installing an OS to begin with.

It is exactly this kind of condescending elitism that is actively damaging the reputation of the Linux community. Click download. Burn download to disk. Insert the disk. Reboot. Click OK on a bunch of dialogs. Done. Canonical has its issues, but at least they understand that much. Your accusation cuts both ways:

"If developers lack the patience, attention span, or ability to produce an easier to use operating system or even proper download instructions, then perhaps they shouldn't be writing an OS to begin with."

Does that sound both obnoxious and arrogant? That's because it is.

Just because someone doesn't see something the same way as you, does not make them stupid. And before you accuse me of being some ignorant n00b for defending those who would dare to tarnish Debian's hallowed name, I've been exclusively using Linux as my main desktop OS since 1997, and yes, at one point that included Debian. Debian was easily the messiest install I ever encountered, and that includes Slackware. If Debian cleaned up their act a decade ago, there would be no need for Ubuntu. As it is, they're the same as the makers of DomainOS, probably one of the best UNIXs out there that died a horrible death because its developers were excellent at coding, and terrible at marketing. Ubuntu is the marketing Debian needs to remain more than a tinkerer's OS, and I'd say it's working so far. How many people cut their teeth on Ubuntu and then moved on to Debian because it's "real" Linux?

People don't just dive into using a new operating system, they need handholding at first and then can develop their skills as they grow into the system. But that'll never happen if they're belittled and ranted at the second they offer a difference of opinion or confusion at an admittedly counter-intuitive interface. Grow up. Or are you getting too old for that, too?

In spite of devoting so much attention to eye candy, Canonical forced on us the new GDM that doesn't bring anything useful over the old one, is incredibly ugly, and cannot be configured in substantial aspects. Has the situation changed with Maverick?

I know, I know, this is only a login manager, and it works OK despite being fugly. But FFS, at least in Debian Squeeze the old GDM is one apt-get away.

I know, I know, this is only a login manager, and it works OK despite being fugly. But FFS, at least in Debian Squeeze the old GDM is one apt-get away.

It works "OK" at best. I have dual monitors. Boot happens on primary display. X comes up with the cursor one pixel to the right of center which puts it on the secondary display. The GDM menu (top or bottom of the screen, as configured) appears on the secondary display. The user chooser shows up on the primary display. This is the most goofy version of Ubuntu since the bad old days before Edgy, everything is like this. Bootsplash just went away during my upgrade, is it supposed to be text-only or did they just bone the package database sometime during my upgrade cycle? I get some kind of elf error on boot that's in the middle of the screen because their text bootsplash doesn't put the cursor someplace sane in between updates to the throbber. They're crapping it up and breaking things (see rants about bluetooth dongle, which works perfectly on Lucid, even audio works, but they broke it in Maverick) to the point where I want to go back to Debian.

customization of the login screen? It was made obsolete by the gnome devs not by canonical and the reason for that was faster boot time. Yes, this sucks, I liked keyboard only logging but ubuntu team is not guilty here (unless you think they should keep and maintain legacy software)

I have a multi-boot desktop Linux system with a 1.5 TB hard drive, a number of Linux distributions on different partitions (Debian, Gnewsense, Ubuntu), and some virtualized Linux distributions living as KVM'd images that I use on those distributions as well.

Lately, what I have been primarily running has been Ubuntu's Maverick Meerkat's alpha and then beta. Not to suggest the alpha was always rock-solid - sometimes huge bugs crept up in it that had me switching back to my stable Ubuntu Lucid Lynx distribution. But if they were bad they were usually dealt with swiftly.

Here is why I think Ubuntu, Canonical and Maverick Meerkat have done a great job.

In February of this year, I was installing Debian squeeze on another system. Once installed, I looked in/etc/fstab to see information on my disk partitions. The disk information was in UUID format, and a comment line in fstab said "Use 'vol_id --uuid' to print the universally unique identifier for a device". So, I did what the file told me and did a "vol_id --uuid". But it didn't work. There was no vol_id program. I did a little digging and saw that the vol_id program had been a part of the udev package on lenny, but now it no longer was. The program to decode those mysterious UUID's had disappeared. I did a little more digging and discovered the blkid program in the util-linux package could decode those UUIDs. I tried it out, it translated the UUIDs to device names for me, and I was happy. However, I realized/etc/fstab was still giving everyone faulty information. So in February I filed a bug report [debian.org] with Debian.

So now it is October, and my bug report sits in Debian's bug tracker, undisturbed by anyone. There have been four updates to the partman-target package (which creates the initial/etc/fstab) since my bug, but none implementing my suggestion to remove the outdated suggestion of using the no longer existent vol_id program, and replacing it with a suggestion to use blkid. In August, Debian squeeze froze in anticipation of release, so it becomes more unlikely my bug will be fixed.

So where does Ubuntu stand with all of this? Well back in May, Ubuntu resynchronized their partman-target with Debian. While doing so, someone checked out Debian's bug tracker, saw my report, and fixed the problem in Ubuntu. While their change log [launchpad.net] in May notes this, I can see it myself when looking at/etc/fstab on my meerkat - "Use 'blkid -o value -s UUID' to print the universally unique identifier for a device".

So this - I find impressive. I am having a problem with Debian and report a bug there, although it remains unfixed. But Ubuntu comes in and fixes the bug which was put on the bug tracker of another system.

Yes, this is just talking about the quality of the distribution and not all of the other things involved, which of course, are important. I know how some Debian developers were (and some still are) unhappy with Canonical and Ubuntu, and how some other upstream contributors are unhappy with Canonical (like Linux developer Greg Kroah-Hartman) and so forth. And whatever acrimony exists, I think the Debian folks and Linux folks and the like are right that Canonical and Ubuntu have to find a way to push more patches upstream. Here is a case though where the bug fix was already upstream, but only Ubuntu decided to implement it.

Considering that I got Ubuntu for free (as in beer), I have been very happy with the responsiveness of the (Canonical etc.) Ubuntu team to my problems and patches via their bug-tracking system, Launchpad. As far as I'm concerned, it is one of the best, and probably largest, testbeds of the Gnome desktop environment out there. I think it's really going to allow for a good, integrated Gnome desktop environment experience, and hopefully the Canonical/Gnome relationship goes w

I feel Ubuntu's momentum within the FOSS community is starting to fade.

The greatest thing Ubuntu did was making a name. It attracted lot's of people and became something you can actually "sell" to business and the masses.

Ubuntu also *had* the best mindset of volunteers, helping and polite instead of RTFM grunts.

Lastly they also did a lot to push in the direction of hardware detection and ease of installation, yes, the Debian installer existed before Ubuntu but they set it up to actually work on most hardware.

It was a fun ride.

Nowadays Ubuntu seems to be stagnated, most progress is in relation to services like Ubuntu one and such. Good for Ubuntu of course but not news worthy anymore. More like newsvertisment.

The few changes in the GUI also leave a bad taste in mouth, a sort of forced Mac-ness that nobody was asking for except the new "design" team. Worse yet in my POV is that the nicer volunteers are gone and are being replaced by a bunch of canonical yes-men.

This year was the year I switched off Ubuntu, I no longer felt loyal to the brand and simply switched to the next best thing I found. For the first time in 6 years news of a new Ubuntu release don't concern me, for the first time in 6 years I wasn't counting down the days before the release, it feels odd.

Lastly they also did a lot to push in the direction of hardware detection and ease of installation, yes, the Debian installer existed before Ubuntu but they set it up to actually work on most hardware.

Seriously? No, that was the first thing Ubuntu did; it was (and is) the primarily reason that Ubuntu made a name. Amongst geeks, it was "hey, try Ubuntu, it's Debian but with better hardware support", and amongst the neophites, it's "try Ubuntu, it's an easy to use Linux".

The volunteers, likewise, followed. They're there simply because it was easy to use, and wasn't Vista or XP (for the most part).

If Ubuntu is 'starting to fade' it's for one of two reasons:

* Hey, Windows 7 is out now.* Those people are growing up and not terribly fanatical - or they're graduating on to other things, like Debian or CentOS (or for that matter, jobs and girlfriends).

My point is: do not marginalize the significance of "just works" installation and hardware support. That is quite important for any "doesn't come preinstalled" OS. The focused on the kernel and the pretty clicky graphics, whereas Debian, on which it is based, focused on utilities and tools. Those efforts, combined, resulted in a pretty solid system (yes, even now).

It's the same approach used by Stormix and Progeny years ago - the efforts of which are, likewise, part of Debian today.

I started up my update manager on my Ubuntu 10.04 computer and it does not have an announcement about a upgrade to the OS. I clicked on the check box and the only thing I got were 3 minor upgrades to 10.04. I just started up software sources and found that it had long term support releases only so when I changed that to normal releases and went back to upgrade manager it did have the 10.10 announcement. I will download the new upgrade and burn a disc so that I can try it before I install it since I have had trouble with the last two upgrades. I use the computer to run BOINC and world community grid and the last two upgrades could not run BOINC without having to change things. The last upgrade BOINC stated that I was running an unsupported linux system until I edited a file and added a line to the options section.

Open Synaptic. Find settings, software sources, updates. Look down near the bottom for "show distribution releases". See what that says. The Maverick isn't an LTS version. If you have LTS option showing, then you'll wait til about April for update manager to tell you that an update is availabe.
HOWEVER - I don't personally recommend upgrading your distribution. Nuke from space and reinstall. Or, install to another hard drive. Or, install to a VM. Or, install to a new machine. Those upgrades can cause strange things to happen. I've a hard drive in this machine with the MOST god-awful graphics, because it's been upgraded through three incarnations of Ubuntu. I've tried, but I can't get it sorted out, so I just started all over on another hard drive. Or, actually, on a RAID array - it amounts to the same thing, except it's a bit faster.